Your Right to Know

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoBrooke LaValley | DispatchDennis Landuyt of Groveport handles absentee ballots alongside fellow seasonal employee Sally Maple of Grove City at the offices of the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Unlike past elections, an initial wave of election results should pour in from across the state
Tuesday night within 45 minutes after the polls close.

But that doesn’t mean it will be time to call the race.

“My expectation is we will be able to declare a winner on election night,” Secretary of State
Jon Husted said yesterday during a briefing about Election Day and beyond.But he also projected
that final, unofficial counts might not be finished until 3 a.m. the day after the election.

Yesterday also saw other developments in Ohio voting:

• Citing reports that voters who wanted to cast a ballot for Mitt Romney had their vote switched
to President Barack Obama by electronic-voting machines, the Republican National Committee asked
elections officials in Ohio and five other states to recalibrate all of the devices by Tuesday’s
election.

• A Husted bulletin to county elections boards late Wednesday to change a method that had been
improperly disqualifying potential absentee voters is inadequate, says the head of the
voter-advocacy group that discovered the problem. Thousands more eligible Ohioans could be denied
the right to vote, said Norman Robbins, research director for Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates.

• U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott denied a prisoners advocacy group’s attempt to win new
rules protecting the voting rights of anyone arrested this weekend and detained through Tuesday.
The national GOP’s chief legal counsel said the problems with voting devices in Ohio and elsewhere
apparently include “miscalibration and hyper-sensitivity of the machines."

The Republicans cited a report by Fox News saying that “several” early voters in North Carolina
said last week that they cast ballots for Romney but the electronic-voting machine logged their
pick as Obama. Fox said similar problems cropped up this week in Ohio, citing a story on Wednesday
in the
Marion Star, Early voter Joan Steven told the newspaper that she had to try three times
before she got the machine to correctly record her vote for Romney instead of Obama.

Elections officials tried but could not duplicate the error but called the machine’s vendor to
have it recalibrated anyway, the
Star said.

“In response to dozens of reports in the media and from voters about irregularities across the
country, including Ohio, we felt it was important for election officials to ensure machines are
properly calibrated and that voters are reminded to double check their ballots,” said national GOP
spokesman Ryan Mahoney. “Any reports of irregularities are a concern, and the RNC is taking a
common-sense step to ensure voters are on guard to make sure their vote properly registers on the
machine.”

Maggie Ostrowski, spokeswoman for Husted, a Republican, said the GOP will not get its wish
because the Marion incident “is the only issue that we’ve been aware of with voting machines.”

“To my knowledge, it’s one voter in one county,” she said. “We’ve got protocols and procedures
in place to ensure that the voting machines are working as they should. ...We’re confident the
counties are doing their due diligence.”

During the news conference, Husted said he has ordered counties to release early-voting results
first on election night; he anticipates that those numbers will be available by 8:15 p.m. In recent
years, a number of counties didn’t release absentee and early in-person voting results until
precincts were totaled later on election night.

In an effort to get election results out more quickly, Husted also has asked counties to release
their updated totals at specific times throughout the night. Large counties are to release results
every 15 minutes, midsized counties every 30 minutes and rural counties every hour.

Husted said his website, for the first time, will report election results by the six regions of
the state, allowing people to track, for example, how Obama is performing this year compared with
results from 2004 and 2008.

Once the final, unofficial count is done, counties can release the number of outstanding
provisional and absentee ballots they have yet to count.

The concern among some political and elections officials is that the race will come down to
Ohio, but the unofficial vote will be so close that it will depend on provisional ballots, plus any
valid absentee and military votes that did not arrive in time to be included in the initial
unofficial count. That process takes 10 days.

Provisional ballots are cast by those whose eligibility cannot be verified at the polling site.
The most-common reasons for casting a provisional ballot are people who did not update their
current address before the Oct. 9 deadline, did not provide proper ID at the poll or voted
in-person after requesting an absentee ballot through the mail.

Husted said he was not sure whether there would be more or fewer provisional ballots cast this
year. He said efforts to clean up the voter rolls and the ability for people to update their voting
address online — something 106,000 people did — should help.

Meanwhile, Robbins chided Husted for not adopting his criteria to make sure no absentee voter is
improperly disqualified.

“Here people are trying to be constructive, and he’s not chosen to listen,” Robbins said. “That’s
the saddest part, and it’s the voters that suffer — from both parties.”

At Robbins’ request, the Cuyahoga County elections board audited its absentee-ballot rejections
over the weekend and found 865 voters who had been improperly denied because the board had not
looked hard enough to make sure they were registered.

Robbins said he found a similar shortcoming in Franklin County, though elections officials here
say they have more-complete information than Robbins’ group and don’t think there is a problem.

Robbins sent Husted the criteria that Cuyahoga County adopted as its protocol, urging him to
work with his group to develop standards that could be used by elections boards across the
state.

Instead, Husted sent out a bulletin telling boards to double check their rejected applications
using a more-limited method.

Robbins said the search criteria Husted proposed will either result in far too many results to
be productive, or they’ll still miss potentially thousands of lawfully registered voters.